Where Are You? January 2015

We all know a picture is worth a thousand words, especially when it comes to travel. Can you guess this month's mystery location?

Sometimes a fortress can be a victim of its own success, so impregnable that it never gets, er, impregnated. Take this remarkable mountaintop garrison. Countless laborers died hauling up the stone for its massive walls, preparing for an invasion that never came. The increasingly paranoid king who had ordered its construction killed himself the same year it was completed, and is buried deep inside. Near his final resting place, hundreds of ornate cannons, still stamped with the seals of the world's oldest royal houses, stand unfired above enormous pyramids of cannonballs stacked taller than a person.

It's a two-hour walk up to the fortress from the ruined palace below, so many visitors dicker for a guide and a donkey. On the four-mile cobblestone road, the heat can be sweltering, but you can buy fresh coconut juice and local jewelry from makeshift villages built along the way. The spear-shaped front of the citadel will soon appear above the trees, perched on the mountaintop like the prow of a giant shipwreck.

The 12-foot-thick castle walls were built directly into the stone cliffs using a mortar of molasses, lime, and the glue from local livestock. Today, the walls drip with brilliant orange and green mosses. Wander the ramparts and the dungeons, designed to allow thousands of people to survive a siege for up to a full year. Mists often shroud the battlements in the afternoon, but on a crystal-clear day, you might see the sea and even the region's largest island, fully 90 miles to the west.